This week was really exciting for us as we had our first client call and got a lot of things sorted out having better clarity into what we will be designing for the Games for Change (G4C) festival. The week began with a logo design meeting where all the artists in the team (Peter, Scott, Brian and Lucien) presented their concept work. There were a lot of good ideas thrown around and we narrowed it down to the a few chosen ones. Scott worked on polishing all these ideas towards to more finalized version and team finalized the logo once we meet on Wednesday.
On Wednesday we had a Skype call with our clients, Emily and Michelle Byrd. Few key notes from the meeting –
- The experience will be completely geared towards the festival
- It should engage at least 100+ people in the experience together, 300-500 overall during the course of the festival
- G4C can give us a dedicated time slot on the schedule for running the experience and have the audience brought in to the theater for that duration
- Our deliverable for 1/4 presentation would be at least 3 solid game ideas that we will pitch to the clients and take it from there
After the client call the team met again to go over these takeaways. We decided to do individual brainstorming and come up with analysis of at least 3 games in the past. both successful and unsuccessful, that were run at festivals and conferences intended to involve a large number of audience together in an experience. We also met with our faculty advisers Drew and Jess on Friday afternoon. Dave Culyba, an applicant for the programming faculty position also joined in. We discussed briefly about our learning from the week and went over the key aspects from the client call. Faculty provided some really constructive feedback and suggestions like getting our constraints down would be really helpful to brainstorm ideas. Especially the social change we will associate are experience with. We also talked about the team visiting New York to see the theater where the festival will be held to get a better sense of the space and meet the clients. I will be working with our faculty advisers, clients and Janice for working out the best schedule for that. Emily will be visiting us on 1st February, Friday so that will be exciting.
The team met on Friday afternoon to share their findings with other team members on such massive games/experiences done in the past. Some of these were really jaw dropping and collectively we had more than 20 different events in the past to look at. These ranged between museum installations to augmented reality mobile applications to interactive art experiences and everything in between. Reflecting back on these different ideas, the team will meet back again on Monday where each member of the team is tasked to present at least two game ideas (playable) that they think are feasible in this space. We will also be starting Monday with our scrum meeting and officially starting off with agile development with our first sprint starting Week 3. The sprint duration would be 2 weeks which would align well with 1/4 walk-around. We will be presenting clients with few potential short listed ideas along with the research that we have done when we will be meeting with them on Friday.
That’s it from Week 2. Have a nice day everyone.
Mayank Grover